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Russia's cold-war mentality

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  • Russia's cold-war mentality

    Russia's cold-war mentality
    By going to war with Georgia, Russia is drawing a new Iron Curtain.

    The Christian Science Monitor
    from the August 11, 2008 edition


    A new Iron Curtain is being drawn around Russia. It's not so
    impregnable or wide as the Soviet one. But Moscow's willingness to war
    with NATO-aspirant Georgia sends this clear message to the expanding
    West: Thus far, and no farther. Given Russia's strength, the West has
    few options.

    Neither the US nor any other NATO country will fight Russia over
    Georgia's two tiny separatist enclaves ` South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
    Russia invaded South Ossetia Aug. 8 after Georgian troops tried to
    reassert influence there. Meanwhile, Russia's sending reinforcements to
    Abkhazia. Both territories have been protected by Russian peacekeepers
    since the early 1990s, when they broke from Georgia in bloody
    rebellions.

    The US is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Who wants war with
    Russia over this?

    Neither does the West have much diplomatic or economic leverage with
    oil- and gas-rich Russia, whose autocratic regime has broad support
    from a population satisfied with stability.

    As Russia's swift and deadly military response in Georgia shows, the
    West has underestimated ` indeed sometimes aggravated ` Moscow's fears
    about growing Western influence eastward.

    Over the last year, Europe and the US pushed ahead with Kosovo's
    independence from Russian ally Ser
    bia. While this may have been the
    right thing to do, it happened over the Kremlin's vigorous objections.
    And the US has not relented on anti-missile installations in Poland and
    the Czech Republic.

    But if others underestimated Russia's determination to control its
    "near abroad" ` and perhaps no one miscalculated more than Georgia's
    pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili ` Russia grossly
    overestimates the threat of the West's eastward march.

    NATO is not an anti-Russian military alliance. The EU has improved the
    economies, governments, and lawfulness of its new eastern members. This
    benefits Russia as an EU trading partner and neighbor.

    When he was Russia's president, Vladimir Putin accused the West of
    reigniting the cold war, but it is actually Russia that's stuck in the
    cold-war mentality.

    Bullying through energy blackmail and now tanks and bombers, it reaches
    for its imperialist past and believes it requires a buffer to protect
    itself from threatening democracies. It would love to get back, or more
    tightly control, parts of Ukraine and Moldova, the long-disputed region
    of Nagorno-Karabakh, and parts of central Asia.

    The West can best respond by starving this cold-war mentality ` and
    weaning itself from Russian fossil fuels. If there is nothing for
    Moscow to fear in NATO and EU expansion, its members should not act as
    if there is. Russia deserves a strong rebuke, but at the same time, the
    West must be careful not to feed Russian nationalism.

    The arguments to be made to Russia now must be ones of reason: Its
    support for separatists can come back to bite it (think Chechnya); and
    is violating another country's sovereignty something Russia would want
    for itself?

    This must be part of a patient strategy that may, in the near term,
    result in Georgia having to give up its enclaves in exchange for peace.
    But for the West to abstain from the cold-war game appears to be the
    only way, over time, to win it.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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